In recent news hitting the art world, digital marketing leader and Forbes Magazine columnist Thomas Herd (CEO of the global ad agency T1 Advertising) has just earned official representation from the prestigious Robb Company for his debut poetry book The Fire That Courses Through Me. 

Herd—already a distinguished business journalist (with over 30 published features between Forbes, Yahoo, Maxim, etc.) is now making a serious name for himself in the literary world as a contemporary poet.

The Fire That Courses Through Me serves up a collection of 11 short story prose-poems which depict the soaring hopes and excruciating heartbreaks of a young American as he contends with the forces of unrequited love and unsustainable riches in old Europe for the first time.

Carrying a profound romantic aesthetic—which at times evokes F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night—with undertones of innocent feeling redolent of JD Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, The Fire That Courses Through Me is certainly worth reading for sensualists who delight in being moved by strong feeling.

To give you an idea, here below is an excerpt from one of the book’s standout poems Little Disagreements in Paris. 

Little Disagreements In Paris 

She says hot summer days spent lounging in the Latin-Quarter reading Hemmingway are the best

I disagree. Driving across the Seine River to the Bastille in the late evening, taking that sharp left onto the tree-lined, lantern-lit cobblestone Blvd. Morland reminiscing of the sex we just had while at full speed is better

She says all the great authors of Paris—Hemmingway included—wrote their best work sitting still at peaceful cafés along Montparnasse and the adjacent boulevards in the left bank

I disagree. I say careening around the bends of the Seine on the Right Bank, from the Bastille to the Tuileries, speeding by the lavishly-dressed demoiselles of Faubourg St. Honore preoccupied by sweet thoughts of a life in love ending with a balcony view of la place Madeleine—flushed with adrenaline—produces the best work.

She says I disagree too much over little things

I say, baby, achieving one such little feeling like this in life is no little thing.